Mr Mooney
by goodbye pork pie hat
Summary: About a year after the attack Stan's living in Austin, TX with Kyle, and they both notice a peculiar hobby possessed by a neighbor of theirs, Mr. Mooney. Rated T for language


"Mr. Mooney"

We never met Mr. Mooney, properly speaking. Kyle and I moved in at the same he did, and as Hidden Acres was a new subdivision then, we were two of the first households on the street. This was all in Austin. The first time I noticed Mr. Mooney he was building an extension onto the back of his house. I could look out the hallway window and see him. First he poured a concrete slab and put up three 4-by-8 pylons. Then he extended his roof out over the slab. The addition had a gentler slope than the original roofline, maybe 10 or 15 degrees as opposed to 45. This whole process took him a week or two. At the time I didn't think to tell Kyle about it. I figured he was just adding a covered patio for family barbecues or something. And the work didn't cause much noise, so why would I have complained? It didn't occur to me to consider that Mr. Mooney had no family. He was a single man.

One evening when Kyle got home from work and was taking off his shoes in the hallway, he happened to glance out the window. I was probably lounging in the living room, reading some book, or maybe I was finishing up our dinner in the kitchen, when I heard Kyle calling to me. "Stan, you're not going to believe this," he was saying. I joined him in the hallway. It was just about dusk, and I looked with him out the window. He was right, I couldn't believe it. There was Mr. Mooney, sitting in a lawn chair up on his new roof, looking through a telescope.

How weird, I thought. The guy hadn't put any furniture on his new covered patio after all. No grill or anything. Just the one lawn chair he kept folded up by the back door. Every night from that point on Mr. Mooney would come out at around dusk, set up a ladder, and climb up to his roof, bringing his lawn chair and telescope with him. Who knows how long he stayed up there. Some nights if there was a storm coming through and the forecast called for lightning, I would peer out the window to see if he was there, not so much out of concern as out of curiosity. Sometimes he was and sometimes he wasn't. I'll tell you this: he was up there some nights I wouldn't have been.

Mr. Mooney enjoyed his simple setup for a few months, then felt the need for change. He bought a new chair, an Adirondack with floral seat cushions and wide arms that he could set a drink on. Sitting in that chair and gazing through his telescope into some patch of sky, he reminded me of a proud owner of a major new possession—a sports car, say, or a yacht. Now that he didn't have to carry his lawn chair up, Mr. Mooney was free to bring an ice chest with him to the roof. I started greeting Kyle at the door around that time, mainly just so we could look out the window together to check him out. It became as integral and reflexive a part of our routine as the hello kiss or the question, "So how was your day?" By the time Kyle got home most nights Mr. Mooney was on his roof with a drink and probably his dinner waiting for him in the chest.

One night a rainstorm left the floral seat cushions drenched and unusable, and after that he decided it would be best to cover his possessions with a tarp. He left the telescope on the roof, along with the chair, and would simply throw this blue tarp over both of them before going inside with the ice chest. I guess the thing wasn't visible from the street, otherwise the neighbors probably would have complained. Or maybe Mr. Mooney was well-liked and could get away with that sort of thing—but I doubted that, since I never saw him go out or invite anyone in. Personally, I didn't find the thing an eyesore, and neither did Kyle. The view from our backyard was mostly of power lines and fences anyway, so at least the tarp was something new. I suppose it did look a little odd, though. The only thing in the whole landscape that seemed off-kilter.

Anyway, Kyle and I started monitoring Mr. Mooney from our kitchen about that time. We just decided this man was too eccentric for a mere glance out the hallway window every week night. As he stood before the stove fixing his plate, Kyle might glance out the window and say, "Oh, Stan, he's rearranging the furniture." When he did this I would go over and stand next to him. And sure enough, there would be Mr. Mooney up on his roof, the sky darkening behind him, dragging his Adirondack this way or that, then taking a step back to admire its new position in the growing moonlight. And always, the telescope looming beside him.

"I bet you anything he sleeps up there during the night," Kyle would say as we sat down to eat. "Just pulls that tarp over himself at bedtime. All he needs is a TV set and a nice floor lamp and he'll be all set up."

Kyle was working for a company with an office downtown. We only had one car, so when he left for the day I was stuck at home. That was fine by me because for a long time after what went down in South Park I wasn't comfortable going out. Sometimes I did jog around the neighborhood, but leaving that area was definitely out of the question.

There wasn't much to see in our neighborhood, so jogging was usually a boring and kind of lonely experience. Our whole street was built into the side of a hill, and every house had in front of it a set of concrete steps leading up into the front yard, each with its own wrought iron rail. Occasionally I'd see a group of people clustered around one set of stairs. Mostly these were housewives chatting it up while their husbands were away. As I got close to them they would stop talking and smile kindly at me, and I would smile back at them. Then when I had put about ten steps between us, they would resume their conversation as if no one had passed. This kind of brief, polite exchange was all I ever had with the neighbors. Come to think of it, that first year in Austin I had almost no relationships outside the house. The only people who would want to talk to me other than Kyle were Kenny and my family, and to be honest I guess I sort of flaked on them till about half a year had passed since the fight. I had a very withdrawn lifestyle.

In addition to housework, I did a lot of reading and cooking, two things I had never done much of before we moved. Over the course of a few months I read some of the worn classics Kyle had poured over in college, along with fiction from the _New York Times _bestseller list. As far as cooking went, it wasn't hard for me to refine my skill with all that free time. When we moved to Austin I was a decent cook, that is to say I knew what just about each appliance and thing in every drawer was there for. But that was pretty much it. Now any time I got hungry I could fix myself a new recipe, or just experiment with whatever was in the fridge or the pantry. This got easier once I got accustomed to going to the grocery store myself. Over time I developed a sense for which flavors went well together and which ones clashed. In fact, I became so confident in my cooking ability that when I decided to get a job, the first place I looked was at local restaurants.

Kyle had never seemed to mind my being unemployed. In fact, it's remarkable how understanding he was of my need to stay home. "Between my salary, pay from side jobs, and our savings, we should be pretty much okay," he told me. "We've got enough to support ourselves as long as we're careful."

He was right, but still after a few months I got the nagging sense that something was missing from my life. Order, I realized, was what I needed. Take Mr. Mooney, for example. I don't know what he did during the day, but every night, weather permitting, he was up on his roof, looking through that telescope. What did I do at night? Same thing I did during the day, for the most part, only alongside Kyle: I cooked for the two of us, read next to him in bed, slept pressed against him instead of alone and on the couch. I needed some kind of routine, and I figured that in addition to giving me that a job would help me meet people in a non-threatening environment. That sounds so cheesy now, but it was important to me then. By the time I started bussing tables at the Sunrise on Lake Austin, I was ready to get out of the house.

What I really want to talk about went down during Kyle's second year at the office. They had an annual Christmas party, and when that time of year rolled around he asked me to go with him. Although this was his second year there, it was his first Christmas party—"hopefully the first of many," he said—so I figured what the hell, it couldn't hurt to be nice and go with him. That was when I was starting work at the Sunrise, and I was feeling okay about things. My need to be alone had evaporated into a kind of loneliness and desire for the company of others.

Every year the place where Kyle worked rented a banquet room somewhere and set up a buffet. That year they had their party at the Hyatt. There was an open bar, and after a while that was where everyone ended up, just telling stories. Some of those guys had pretty interesting stories, especially the ones who were on the road part-time. I enjoyed listening to them.

It got to be midnight and things were still going strong. I had lost track of how late it was. At one point some of Kyle's coworkers had come up, tugged on his sleeve, and asked to see him for a minute. He had apologized to me and sworn he'd be right back, but I told him truthfully that I didn't mind. How long ago had that been? Almost an hour now. I looked around the room for him, and after half a minute of searching I saw him sitting in a metal folding chair at the corner of a table. He was smoking a cigarette. Uh oh, I said to myself. Kyle didn't smoke, and whenever he did it was a sign he was either drunk or mad. I excused myself and went over to where he was sitting. He was talking to some big bald guy, but they called a halt when I walked up.

I sat down and the big bald guy got up. "What's up?" I said to Kyle. He had a plastic cup in front of him half filled with red wine, and now he turned it up and finished it. "Bad news?"

He eyed me. "Are you wanting to go home?" he asked.

The truth was, I didn't want to go home. I was having a good time. "Whatever you want," I said.

"Well," he said. "I'll see if I can tear myself away."

While Kyle and I said goodbye to his coworkers at the bar, I was thinking about what I'd say to him in the car if he asked how everything had gone. Well, it was a Christmas party, I'd say, and I haven't gone to one of those in years. There were a lot of funny stories and everything was on the house. So yeah, I'm feeling pretty good. Kyle was curt with his goodbyes. He tugged on my arm to let me know he was ready to leave.

He was obviously in a bad mood. Those skinny office nerds who had pulled him away must've said something upsetting to him, and now he was pissed off, dammit. Wanting to hold on to the good feeling the party had given me, and maybe spread a little of it to Kyle, I said, "Hey, how about a nightcap up on the roof?" At the Hyatt they had a bar on the roof that rotated. It made a complete rotation every twenty-something minutes. Kyle didn't say anything, just gave me a look, like "Oh please." I thought if I could get him upstairs, I could make it up to him. I thought it might be fun to sit on the roof of the Hyatt and see if we could pick out the streets, maybe tell where our house was.

On the elevator you could see down into the lobby as you ascended the one hundred and sixty or so feet up to the bar. Kyle folded his arms and put his back against the plexiglass, but I looked down the whole way. In the bar I asked for a table right next to the window. (That way we were away from the crowd.) I ordered a brandy alexander and Kyle got some more wine.

"Well, here we are," I told Kyle. He just nodded. I looked out the window and tried to see if there were any stars out, but I guess from downtown you couldn't see a thing. The sky seemed to end right above the pole on the highest building. Maybe it was too bright to see, or maybe there was too much of a reflection. So I looked down below but I didn't recognize any landmarks. That was when it occurred to me that although we'd been living in it for almost a year, the whole city of Austin was a mystery to me. I'd never been able to muster the courage to leave our neighborhood, and now I had no hope of finding our house among all the other thousands of visible houses. South Park was never so big, so sprawling, so beautiful. Any normal person would have called a cab or even caught a bus downtown instead of wasting all his time at home. And if being alone was what I feared, I thought, why didn't I just go out with Kyle? No doubt he would have appreciated a night on the town. I realized this was our first night out together since those guys attacked me. I'd been living the life of a recluse, a hermit in the heart of the suburbs, too afraid to venture out and start a conversation with someone new and potentially dangerous. Well now that I was thinking about it, there was potential for change. I figured the change had been slow in coming, but it didn't have to be now that I'd recognized it. I had one of those moments where you're overcome by passion and ready to talk, and I wanted to tell Kyle I was eager to turn over a new leaf and start exploring Austin, and I would take him with me. We would go dancing and drinking together, have fun and not have to worry about anything—nothing in the world. We would see movies and the dark wouldn't make me nervous. My time wouldn't be spent cooking anymore because Kyle and I would go out and eat. Suddenly cooking seemed stupid, a waste of time, when Austin was stretched out so big and inviting beneath us. Kyle and I would get a sense for what was good and what wasn't around town.

"Hey, Kyle," I said, and I put my hand on his. He looked me in the eye for a second, and then he looked away. His eyes locked on something, then on something else. I wanted to tell him about the revelation I'd had, how I couldn't have had it anywhere but in that bar and with him, but instead I tried to get him to look at the window and tell me what some of the buildings or plazas were, or see if he could try and find our house. But he just said the spinning was upsetting his stomach. At one point a well-dressed lady walked by in a long fur coat, and Kyle said, "Two dozen cats had to die for that?"

Around that time I figured out he was drunk and decided we should go home. I paid the check and got him on the elevator. He did fine, although he did walk about a mile ahead of me through the lobby. I figured that was okay. After taking off his shoes he went to sleep in the car, leaning against his door. I went home slow and enjoyed the ride. It had been a long time since I had been out that late, and I really looked around to see what the city was like at that time of night. Maybe I was a little tipsy. In any case, I was feeling good.

When we got home I parked on the street and went around to Kyle's door. I opened it slowly and said something to him so he wouldn't fall out. Then I realized I was going to have to help him inside. Without raising his head he said very clearly, "Just leave me alone." But I got him around the waist and began helping him up the steps—not the front steps, but the steps that come up into the yard from the street. When we were halfway up, Kyle started to keel over. I tried to catch him against the railing but they had built it with a pretty light-gauge metal and so it didn't hold us. It sheared off even with the ground. We landed in the yard. Jesus, I thought. I hope none of the neighbors are awake to witness this. What a pleasure and a pain, to be thinking about the neighbors' opinions!

I managed to get Kyle back on his feet, which wasn't easy because he wasn't helping much. Then I walked him to the front door and held him up with my arm while I looked for the keys. Then the strangest thing happened. I heard something on the other side of the door. I was looking down and I saw the doorknob turn. Somebody was inside our house. Horrified, I stood there while the door opened. It was Mr. Mooney. He had on a bathrobe and slipper socks and he was wearing a pair of tortoise-shell glasses. I didn't know whether to be relieved or what. I couldn't believe he was in our house. And he had this surprised look on his face, too, like he hadn't expected us home so early.

"What are you two faggots doing on my porch?" he demanded.

Neither Kyle nor I said anything. I looked at Kyle. Somehow he was back on his feet again, standing there upright with his eyes wide open. But he was completely silent. That was when I looked down the street and realized I was over one door too far. Somehow I had gotten turned around getting Kyle out of the car, come up Mr. Mooney's steps, broken off his faux wrought-iron railing, stumbled around on his front porch. Mr. Mooney kept looking at us, and I may have said something like, "Excuse us," or, "Oops." Suddenly Kyle stepped down off the porch and walked in a very straight line across the lawn toward our house. I caught up with him at the hedge. He went over the decorative Moroccan rock landscaping in his socks. Mr. Mooney may have stayed out on his porch watching us; I didn't look back.

The next morning I woke up and made some coffee. I took a cup back to Kyle in the bedroom, along with the newspaper, and he sat up in bed and began to read. I kissed his forehead but he didn't seem to acknowledge me, so I took my cup to the living room and looked out the window. Sure enough, there was the car, right in front of our house. It seemed impossible that I could have wandered all the way over to Mr. Mooney's door instead of ours. And then I noticed something else. The iron railing in front of his house which Kyle and I had broken off the night before was back to normal. This was pretty early, so I figured he must have just stood it back in place. There was no way he could have done the welding already, right?

I went back to the bedroom and lay down next to Kyle. He and I got to talking about something trivial, like maybe a new Quentin Tarantino movie. After about a minute he warmed up and soon we were reminiscing and laughing. We didn't say one word about what had happened the night before, what those skinny office nerds had said to him, or what Mr. Mooney had said to us. I don't know if Kyle even remembers that stuff.

Six years have passed since that night, and things have changed big time. For one thing, Mr. Mooney's got two chairs up on his roof now, matching Adirondacks, and a little hutch with some books in it that he reads if it's still light enough. Some nights if Kyle happens to glance out the window in the kitchen as he's fixing his plate, he'll say, "Well, he's at it again." And though we don't have much to say about that fact, when he sits down I know we're both thinking similar thoughts about this strange man, and our strange history.


End file.
